Hammerlock

Anthem for Outlaws (Man’s Ruin)
by Martin Popoff

Man, I gotta stop playing this thing over and over again and get some other stuff heard and reviewed. But I can’t, because redneck rock rules my porch reet now. First it was American Dog’s debut a hunnerd times, then Nashville Pussy, but now this second from a San Fran man and wife team of all things! A shot of this and you’ll be off waving your arms into the woods after your mangy mutt after a skunk, you drunk. What makes it work is this: there’s 20 very different songs, including a bikered up, liquored up stomp through “Battle Of New Orleans,” “Cold Coors” which lifts Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock’n’Roll,” punk, blues, slide, barrelhouse cowpunk, nods to Foghat, Raging Slab, Agony Column, Four Horsemen, basically Nashville Pussy cow-prodded with the succinct sphincters of The Minutemen, the drooling wobble-lips of The Replacements and the supercharged windmill guitars of Hüsker Dü. Now let’s not have a million bands like this, please. Leave it in the hands of a special few (and this big red truck trio are indeed). We all saw what happened to stoner rock…
(610 22nd St. #302 San Francisco, CA 94107)